A Quick Note On Internet Hoax Stories

Typically we don't do this, but since our inbox continues to be flooded with a story posted in EUTimes.net, which unfortunately did exactly zero fact checking and source validation (and is now being distributed by sellside desks!), sourced by famous internet hoax master "Sorcha Faal" aka David Booth, titled "Russia Says IMF Chief Jailed For Discovering All US Gold Is Gone" and which is 100% non-factualand based on a loose scattering of data. A quick google check of the source would have been sufficient for everyone who has been fooled by this complete fabrication, to quickly dismiss it. Alas, with the world now approaching The Onion in factual headline flow, we can see how it is easy for many to have been fooled. We just wish to caution readers to be wary, and always, and that is absolutely true for anything read on Zero Hedge as well, always, to validate and double check the factual veracity of anything read on the Internet, especially if it sound like a B-grade Hollywood thriller and cites "sources."

If DSK knew it then Timmah had to know.If Timmah had to know then so too's Benjie.And Chuckie "The Cheese" SchroomerAnd if Chuckie Cheese knew then so too's Bawnie FwankAnd if the Fwank knew, then so too...

See where I'm going?Easy now.I'm tryin' to help here.

And if they knew, then so'd OBL, which is why he was killed... altho a bunch of Navy Seals say that he wasn't dead but strapped to an old rusty iron mattress, hooked up to a long extension cord, plugged into a 220v outlet and dumped in the ocean to de-guass the carrier.Which is what activated HAARP and cause a temporal time dilated rift resulting in the earthquake which caused the Tsunami which caused the meltdown at Fuckushittinme which caused the slow down in the world's economy so it really all was caused by the weather. Including Goldman's miss on the Non-farm payrolls excluding food, energy and Wall Street bonuses.

"And if they knew, then so'd OBL, which is why he was killed... altho a bunch of Navy Seals say that he wasn't dead but strapped to an old rusty iron mattress, hooked up to a long extension cord, plugged into a 220v outlet and dumped in the ocean to de-guass the carrier.Which is what activated HAARP and cause a temporal time dilated rift resulting in the earthquake which caused the Tsunami which caused the meltdown at Fuckushittinme which caused the slow down in the world's economy so it really all was caused by the weather."

it is simple! Info you pay for is true, free stuff is a lie-- err - the other way round ... err, no the first, what was the first, again? No, it was 'follow the money'.. , ach, rutscht mir alle den Buckel runter!

How do i know that this is a true statement? I need some sources to let me know that there are things that aren't entirely true. I can't just take what anybody says as facts... How do I know that I don't take what anybody says as facts? I need sources for that too.

This doesn't mean it is all there, nor does it mean it isn't there. Rather, it is just a made up story about fabricated rape allegations as a cover up for something that doesn't really make any sense (why would the CIA tell DSK that the gold was gone?).

Yeah, when I looked at the linked story about how Putin was saying that this was the case, I was sorely disappointed. If this story had had any validity, I would have considered moving from silver to gold, as that would have sped up the timeline for the dollar collapse. Happily/sadly that is not the case.

Even though through the powers of deductive reasoning it is possible to extrapolate a similar conclusion? Based of course only on economic assessment of the Fed's own explicit actions and inactions, and an utter lack of punitive liabilities applied to 20 years of mindless monetary policies?

I guess the Fed 'could' have gold reserves remaining, but I have doubted that for many years. It can continue to exist on rumour alone for all I give a shit.

edit: Here's a thought, why not put an end to all the rumour and inuendo and allow the public to 'audit the Fed'? err, make that all central banks upon which all this bullshit financial corruption relies upon.

If you page down, they do have a pretty good world wide news link section (with actual news). And you know that when they post stories in the real news section, they check them against their own stories, so they don't accidentally hoax themselves. Which could make them one of the more reliable sources out there!

I read somewhere on the net that there really is no such thing a digital. Apparently all part of the great hoax. Try to Google if there really is such a thing as digital or even digits, and see what you get. Just lots and lots of mis-information. It's all just really fast analog. ;- )

Which is not to say the story itself is necessarily in all respects false, just that it was put out by a known hoaxster, and its details cannot, at this point, be verified through any known, legitimate sources.... ;-)

It was fairly obvious the tin-foil hat site had picked up on the official posts on a gov. web-blog (Russian official - most likely not Putin himself, too busy huntin shootin fishin for bears. Does Obama post on a Washington blog? No, I doubt Putin does either), added a dash of drama (PMs are popular, and the story over tungsten gold is now creditable internet legend type referencing) and got itself a 'scoop'.

The MSM (or rather, Telegraph owners, cough Mercury Investigators) love running with this type of quasi-story. Plants the seed that Putin is a dangerous-sexual-predator-preacher-religious-nutter, 'on a mission from God', even if a) it isn't his belief and b) there's absolutely zero way to verify if said sects of lusting ladies exists [although it sounds plausible, which is the hook]. Note that the picture chosen has an appropriate threat level of aggression / directed off camera to it.

That's a story which has some legs to it; especially as it seems to mix up causation (does a metaphor denote a real belief about the world? Can it tell irony? If they're detecting radical terrorists via metaphors and sending drone attacks on that info, expect "collateral murder" to become more popular) - also note heading within the PDF, 'The State of the Art'; tin foil hats suggest there's something to all these I. Banks references. ^^ (trans: memes /b/ etc are going to shred through that software, I'd be very interested in viewing the outcome).

Expect the automatic trolls of the interweb to start employing mass use of metaphors; here, "SILVER BITCHES" will be the most frequent. ZH is a the sweaty love-nest of the swinging world, oi!

Wow, fascinating side trip into the world of disinformation, thanks. My point was mainly to point out the difficulty of discerning truth from fantasy from malicious disinfo, as the deeper down the rabbithole we (and the world) go, there is increasingly little difference.

I LOL (as well as shudder with fright) at the FBO links, as I know a little bit about automatic language detection in large amount of native-language.

The point is that there's no longer any difference. As Bush's camp said - The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” http://blog.urbanomic.com/sphaleotas/archives/without-a-doubt/without-a-...

If you employ the old logic of Rationalism on the world, you'll end up like the heeby-jeeby posters (who always give themselves away by the lurid palettes their sites have; loss of aesthetics is a sure sign of a knobbled noodle); as Nike said, "Just Do It".

Just reading the headline I can tell it was a hoax. If indeed DSK discovered the gold was gone, he would have been the victim of a robbery and found dead in a stairwell. His pockets pulled out and cc cards gone for effect.

Stupid! the quote is NOT from Lincoln, it is from Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Part III: Of a Christian Common-wealth, Chapter 13

I think that's a bit off - slanted to the appropriate information level, both have their usages.

i.e. Q: Would I trust snopes on their analysis of 'the lemming myth'? A: Yes, given the ease of reference, the length of time ago it was, and the fact that there's multiple other worse myths about Disney out there which the Corporation would have much more interest in suppressing. Aka, Walt Disney was a Nazi; Walt Disney's head is cryogenically frozen, multiple people have died in Disney theme parks, and so on and so forth.

Q: Would I trust a wiki article on the reasoning behind Kissinger getting an honorary OBE (Knight Commander) whose motto is For God and the Empire?A:No - neither wiki nor me have access to Royal persons, and I've no idea what Kissinger did-or-did-not do for the British Commonwealth.

that guy or gal, whoever it is, has been making silly claims like this for a while now. not sure what the purpose is. he is kind of like that idiot that lives in japan, benjamin fulford. frankly i think there are a lot of bored rich young men running around with nothing to do......

Publishing a steady stream of ridiculous false conspiracy claims is a good way to discredit legitimate alternative news sources. If you don't support the MSM paradigm you must be one of those conspiracy nuts who belive HAARP causes earthquakes and the government has secret alien technology.

In case nobody really noticed there have been a series of low profile cases of "hoax" stories making mainstream in recent months. This is in fact on purpose in a longer cause to otherwise create some kind of Ministry of Truth/Propaganda, where the MSM is perceived to be the ONLY source of legitimate "news."

You will see an escalation of bogus "news" making the rounds as 20 something twitter junkies with broken spellcheckers constitute an idiot army of investigative reporters for the MSM.

Sprinkle in more "Anonymous" hacking and the emerging security complex will be writing internet traffic tickets for Sedition.

It's hard to believe in a world where anyone can publish information that the lies would increase. The only thing worse is a world where six multinational corporations do the same. Reminds me of capitalism

they are called disinfo and cointelpro , etc. their job is to spread lies and disinformation and to spread fear and waste time and to cause both ends to fight against the middle.... there are many of them. kind of like the king fat daddy on this , is alexander bullhorn jones of austin texas.........

is it any wonder a man like jones is able to get so successful so fast? i think not. someone obviously likes his work.....this world is full of people like this now. i suggest it always has been. in this world of electronic media in the year 2011, this problem is most acute now.

Tyler ‘s warning is well heeded. Worst of all, the Internet can be used as a tool in the hands of freedom subversives such as Obama’s Information Czar Cass Sunstein. On the other hand, sifting the truth from freedom of speech that creates such kernels as Zero Hedge is more than worth the honing of our scrutiny. In our era, for example, there’s no greater manipulation of the facts than from the propagandists for war. Here’s a snippet of the power of the Internet that our wannabe controllers abhor, written by Antiwar’s Justin Raimondo in – The Reinvention of Historical Memory….

“Human memory is the War Party’s deadliest enemy, and that’s why they do everything to either make us forget, or else lead us to believe in some fictional version of the past, one that obscures the utter failure of all our past wars to accomplish what its authors said they wanted to achieve…

“If we fast-forward our time machine from Lend-Lease to the Berlin airlift, we arrive at our destination in the blink of an historical eye. Yet the former was already forgotten by the time the latter leaped into the headlines, except by a few Cassandras whose voices went largely unheard and unheeded.

“Those were in the days before the Internet, before the era of instantaneous communication and universal interconnectedness, the great advance that keeps memory alive and immortal in cyberspace. The Cassandras of the present era can be heard, and, even if they’re not always heeded, the evidence of their prescience is recorded and preserved by the great god Google, whose sacred algorithms have given us the modern equivalent of the sibyl’s oracular power. We can connect to the past with a few strokes of the keyboard, and not just call up the Official History but all versions of history as recorded by both the victors and the vanquished, the Court Historians and the Cassandras – and, in the process, glean some hint of what the future holds. The invention of the Internet augurs, perhaps, the reinvention of historical memory.

“No, the Internet is not a panacea: there is no technological determinism that will automatically free us from the grip of tyrants and warmongers. Yet it is a very effective weapon in the peacemakers’ arsenal, one that could spell the effective end of the intellectual and political monopoly enjoyed by the War Party up until this point in the development of the human race. The playing field has been leveled, somewhat, by the introduction of this liberating technology, and yet … and yet we still face a lot of the same strategic and tactical disadvantages that have given the War Party the upper hand in the modern era.”

"Anonymous officals have reported that Zher's have performed their due diligence in debunking interent gold rumors. However, other sources close to the investigation say that report is premature based on a lack of evidence"

Wasn't the CIA formed to battle the offworlders? Then the NSA was formed to watch the CIA because the aliens took them over. But then the NSA got tooken over too so they made the NRO to watch the NSA but they got infiltrated too. So that's why we have DHS. There's nothing there worth taking over.

The only group that can stop the fantasy is a bigger army. We have seen the US Military play 'games' in the ME with their kiddie gloves on. A full scale, damm the public perceiption, kill the babies war would probably shock everyone. Until that time Timmy, Ben, DSK ... all just funny actors keeping a 500 act play going.

EUTimes has long been known to be a fraudulent news site. A few weeks ago they ran a story saying that the Chinese gave the US an ultimatum that if the US were to attack Pakistan, that China would see it as an attack on China. Of course, this story was BS. What is worse, the EUTimes rarely ever cites the author of their stories. That China/Pak story just so happened to be written by Webster Tarply (another hack). However, most stories that they do run has a little "source" link on the bottom, if you click on that you typically find that the source is of a questionable nature.

The EUTimes states that it is based in Europe, with branches in America and Canada. However, there is only one confirmed location for the EUTimes, and that is in Englewood, Colorado. Their supposed parent company is 'Tucows', which is really just a proxy created by 'Contact Privacy, Inc' in Toronto, Ontario.

The article is a classic disinformation tactic designed to squelch any serious probing into the DSK affair. "nature abhors a vacuum.". This is why this preposterous story was created - to go viral and distract. Regardless I did find the timing and method of the DSK takedown to be "interesting.". It's now that much harder to discuss intelligently without looking foolish (the true aim of the article).

Edit: since DSK wanted to steer developing countries, like Egypt, away from the dollar, I'm going to guess that these two bankers knew each other (Omar seems very influential), and were making overtures to get off the US Dollar Crack. This is a very public message to world bankers - do not fick with the reserve currency or we will humiliate you in front of the world.

Pretty slick trick.

How dare those bankers grope our virginal US maids!

Do you really think that guys spending $1k a night on a hotel room wouldn't order up a discrete pro?

Concentrate on the interesting facts: two influential anti-dollar, world bankers, taken down by the same flimsy, "budget honeypot" operation. Did the bankers know each other (guessing yes)? Is the takedown related? (guessing yes)

"Alas, with the world now approaching The Onion in factual headline flow, we can see how it is easy for many to have been fooled. We just wish to caution readers to be wary, and always, and that is absolutely true for anything read on Zero Hedge as well, always, to validate and double check the factual veracity of anything read on the Internet, especially if it sound like a B-grade Hollywood thriller and cites "sources."

Thanks for this post Tyler...I was starting to sound like Johnny-One-Note ;-)